Word: rasputin
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...RaRa Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen/ Russia's greatest love machine...
Those improbable lyrics, belted out by a Jamaican reggae-rock group called Boney M., are from the hottest pop tune in the Soviet Union. In restaurants and bars throughout the country last week, disc jockeys were spinning the group's recording of Rasputin, which has been issued by the government record company Melodiya. At the same time, curiously, the sellout novel of the year depicts Grigori Rasputin's sexual escapades, including boudoir frolics with Russia's last empress, the Tsarina Alexandra...
...rumor about the monk, whose skill in doctoring the Tsarina's sick son gained him inordinate influence over the royal family in the final decade of the Russian empire. By prudish Soviet standards, Pikul's empurpled prose is downright lurid. In one key scene, for example, Rasputin sneaks up to the Tsarina as she prays for her hemophiliac son. Out of the shadows steps the "bony peasant, his face framed by long hair parted in the center and glistening with oil, his eyes emitting a kind of hypnotic sparkle." The Tsarina shakes "in a fit of nervous excitement...
Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
Even more striking is the book's appeal to antiSemitism. According to Pikul, Rasputin was the tool of "Zionists," who exploited his political influence on the imperial family, paying the monk off with bonds, cash and cases of his favorite Madeira. With backing from Jewish bankers, Rasputin and his secretary, Aaron Simonovich, allegedly owned several night clubs "with card tables, and a buffet frequented by strange-looking, svelte women with eyes big from cocaine...